This article is intended primarily to help people caught between the vast array of tools for data analysis, and need to make a decision backed with sufficient information. A cross-section of people who will find this article helpful include; New entrants in the data space, Data leaders who need to make decisions on tools, and other data enthusiasts.

In this installment, we take a close look at two leading tools in the data visualization space according to the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, Tableau and Power BI.

source: Gartner (March 2022)

In this blog, we shall examine the similarities and differences between both BI tools through the use of the following metrics;

• History and Development
• Product Range
• Learning and Ease of Use
• Community
• Connectivity
• Cost and Team setup
• Free Usage
• Market

Lets get started...

History and Development

Tableau

Tableau was developed in 2003 as a collaborative effort between Christain Chatbot, Pat Hanrahan, and Chris Stolte in Mountain View, California. The founders were researchers at the computer science department at Stanford University, and they specialized in visualization techniques for exploring and analyzing data. Tableau was started as a commercial outlet for research at Stanford between 1999 and 2002, and in 2019, it was acquired by Salesforce in a $15.7 billion deal.

Power BI

Power BI was designed in the summer of 2010 by Ron George in a project codenamed “Project Crescent”. Thierry D’Hers and Amir Netz, both members of the SQL Server Reporting Services team originally conceived the application. On July 24, 2015, the first version of Power BI was released to the public, and it was based on some Microsoft Excel add-ins like; Power Query, Power Pivot and Power View. 4 years later, the software reviewing company, “gartner.com”, confirmed Microsoft as a leader in the "2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform”.

Product Range

Tableau’s suite of products includes Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, Tableau Public, Tableau Mobile, Tableau Cloud

Power BI’s product range includes; Power BI Desktop, Power BI Service, Power BI Mobile Apps, Power BI Gateway, Power BI Embedded, Power BI report server, Power BI Dataflow, and Power BI Dataset.

Learning and Ease of Use

There’s a saying that a tool is only as good as its user, this is very a important mindset to have when thinking about tools in general. With that being said, we take a comparative look at the ease of learning how to use Power BI and Tableau.

In Tableau, visuals are highly customizable but learning how to can be a relatively steep process. Also, dashboard interactivity is reliant on the user to set for the most part.

One of Power BI’s strengths is the array of customized visuals you can access through its visual marketplace. Power BI also handles (and abstracts) dashboard interactivity to a significant extent for the user.

We compare building a simple pie chart in both Tableau and Power BI below.

Tableau boasts of a globally readily available community for beginners looking to immerse themselves in the tool. Tableau also hosts a series of introductory lessons for beginners to get started with the tool.

Microsoft also hosts a comprehensive tutorial to get beginners started on Power BI, and there’s a host of other online learning resources available as well as an online forum where you can have your questions answered.

Verdict:

I have to say that Power BI is a relatively easier tool to learn because of the array of customized visuals and marketplace that Power BI users have access to, and also because Power BI abstracts away from the user some technicalities like dashboard interactivity to a better extent than Tableau.

Community

Tableau has both an online forum for Q&A, and also a thriving public gallery “Tableau Public” where users post data visualization projects built with Tableau. The primary difference with Tableau Public is that you get the sense that Tableau intentionally tries to promote Data Visualization as a hobby, especially through its series of data viz challenges like #makeovermonday #ironviz, etc.

There is an active #datafam community and this has to be one of the main attractions of Tableau. Personally, most of my learnings have come from studying the works of other brilliant data viz experts on Tableau Public, and from being a member of location-based user groups like WeVisualize in Lagos Nigeria. Special shout-outs to Zainab, Idris, Tobi, and Abby.


Power BI hosts an online forum where Power BI enthusiasts can ask and have their questions answered by other community members. There is also a “Data Stories” gallery where users can publicly share data visualization projects built with Power BI.

Tableau Public Homepage

Verdict:
Tableau takes the cake on the community because of how active Tableau Public is, and the incredible array of visualization and challenges you can find as a Tableau user.

Connectivity

On connectivity, we look specifically at how both tools connect to different kinds of data sources and third-party software.

Power BI Desktop and Tableau Desktop both allow one to connect to an impressive array of file-based (excel, text/CSV, spatial files) data sources, and server-based data sources like Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, MySQL, etc. So it's quite difficult to separate them based on this. If you’re going to work with a file or server-based data source, both tools will handle your requirements satisfactorily.

However, Power BI slightly edges out Tableau because of its connectivity range for third-party software. Power BI allows you to integrate important tools like Asana, Mixpanel, Zendesk, SurveyMonkey, and a host of others into your workflow. Also, the Power BI development team regularly adds to Power BI’s capacity to integrate with other tools.

As a side note, because Power BI is a Microsoft tool, it is probably the better tool to use if your organization is already Microsoft-heavy (i.e you’re dependent on other Microsoft software). There’s much better integration with Microsoft’s universe.

Also, both tools allow you the flexibility of creating custom connectors whenever you see fit

Tableau data sources

Power BI data sources

Verdict:
Both tools perform really well in this regard, but Power BI slightly edges out Tableau due to its capacity to integrate with and connect to third-party tools.

Cost and Team Setup

In this section, we compare pricing across tools and assume a data team of 4 individuals.

Tableau has 3 pricing tiers for teams. A creator license, an explorer license, and a viewer license. A creator license comes with access to Tableau’s suite of products including, Tableau Cloud, Tableau Desktop, and Tableau Prep Builder. The explorer license allows access to self-service analytics on the Tableau cloud, but it comes without access to Tableau Desktop and Prep Builder. The viewer’s license comes with access to view, and interact with dashboards (Ideal for non-technical members of the team who only need to consume reports).

We will assume that each member of the data team needs full access to Tableau’s range of products, and as such will require a creator’s license. The creator’s license costs $70 per user monthly, this adds up to $840 per user annually or $3,360 for a team of 4.

It’s also important to add here that one creator’s license and 3 explorer licenses might be sufficient for a data team of 4, in which case the explorer’s license costs $42 per user monthly. One creator’s license and 3 explorer’s license adds up to $2,353 (about 30% saved).


Power BI also has 3 pricing tiers; Power BI Pro, Power BI Premium (per user), and Power BI Premium (capacity). For the most part, a Power BI Pro subscription will be sufficient for small data teams. However, with the Power BI pro subscription, you lose out on access to Microsoft’s advanced AI capabilities like text analytics, image detection, and automated machine learning.

There are also some storage considerations to look out for in the pro plan, for instance, each user is limited to a data model size of 1GB and can perform 8 refreshes per day conversely, with a premium account, each user gets up to 100GB in data model size and up to 48 refreshes per day. In any case, since we agree that a Power BI pro plan is sufficient, we can work with that.

The Power BI pro plan costs about $13.70 per user monthly or $164 per user annually. For a team of 4, this adds up to $657 in annual Power BI costs, or $54.8 monthly. You can find more details about Power BI’s pricing here

Tableau's pricing page

Power BI's pricing page

Verdict:
In our hypothetical scenario, for a team of 4, Power BI will cost about $657 annually, compared to $3,360 annually in tableau for the same team size. Power BI is significantly cheaper than Tableau by almost a factor of 5.

Free Usage

Both tools allow you to get a good feel of what the core product is like albeit with some limitations.

Tableau allows users access to Tableau Public free of charge. Tableau Public can be best described as a lighter version of Tableau Desktop. However, Tableau public users cannot save their workbook files on their local devices. Instead, they have to publish to Tableau Public’s online profile. Also, there are some limitations to the amount and type of data sources that Tableau Public users can connect to.

Microsoft allows anyone to download the Power BI desktop app and start analyzing data. I particularly appreciate access to Power Query which users can use for free to clean and transform data. However, some limitations exist. For example, you’re not able to publish reports to the Power BI service and share them with other people without a paid account.

Verdict:
This is really close to the call. Power Query is a very powerful data transformation tool that users can access for free with Power BI desktop. On the other hand, one of Tableau’s biggest strengths is the community it has built by making users share their works online.

Market

I ran a survey to test out the penetration of each of these tools in various markets, mostly to validate some pre-existing assumptions on what I imagine the market looks like. Eventually, I didn’t get the level of response I was looking for, also responses were skewed because the majority of respondents reside/work in Nigeria.

In any case, Nigeria is a Microsoft-dominated market, and you can expect a larger share of organizations to prefer Power BI as their chosen tool for Data Visualization.

55% of the respondents to our survey also indicated that Power BI is the data visualization tool in use in their places of work. Outside of Nigeria and on the international scene, you might probably find a better balance in the distribution of usage between Tableau and Power BI. Regardless, it is quite clear that they are the dominant players in the data visualization space.

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